Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-v9fdk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T12:34:18.137Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Jihad in a World of Sovereigns: Law, Violence, and Islam in the Bosnia Crisis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Darryl Li
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article argues that jihads waged in recent decades by “foreign fighter” volunteers invoking a sense of global Islamic solidarity can be usefully understood as attempts to enact an alternative to the interventions of the “International Community.” Drawing from ethnographic and archival research on Arab volunteers who joined the 1992–1995 war in Bosnia‐Herzegovina, this article highlights the challenges and dilemmas facing such jihad fighters as they maneuvered at the edges of diverse legal orders, including international and Islamic law. Jihad fighters appealed to a divine authority above the global nation‐state order while at the same time rooting themselves in that order through affiliation with the sovereign and avowedly secular nation‐state of Bosnia‐Herzegovina. This article demonstrates an innovative approach to law, violence, and Islam that critically situates states and nonstate actors in relation to one another in transnational perspective.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 41 , Issue 2 , Spring 2016 , pp. 371 - 401
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

References

Abou El Fadl, Khaled. 2001. Rebellion and Violence in Islamic Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Abū Sa῾d, Muṣṭafā. 1994a. Min ajl iḥlāl al‐salām fil‐Būsna wal‐Harsak. al‐Furqān, December, 34.Google Scholar
Abū Sa῾d, Muṣṭafā. 1994b. Min intiṣārāt al‐mujāhidīn. al‐Furqān, December, 35.Google Scholar
Afsaruddin, Asma. 2013. Striving in the Path of God: Jihad and Martyrdom in Islamic Thought. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Alibašić, Ahmet. 2003. Traditional and Reformist Islam in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Cambridge: Cambridge Programme for Security in International Society.Google Scholar
Arnaut, Fikret. n.d. Mezhebi u Islamu. Munich: Džema'at Sabur.Google Scholar
Asad, Talal. 2007. On Suicide Bombing. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Azinović, Vlado. 2007. Al‐Kai'da u Bosni i Hercegovini: Mit ili stvarna opasnost? Prague: Radio Free Europe.Google Scholar
Behnke, Andreas. 2004. Terrorising the Political: 9/11 Within the Context of the Globalisation of Violence. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 33 (2): 279–312.Google Scholar
Bellion‐Jourdan, Jérôme, and Benthall, Jonathan. 2003. The Charitable Crescent: Politics of Aid in the Muslim World. London: I. B. Tauris.Google Scholar
Bennoune, Karima. 1994. As‐Salāmu ῾alaykum? Humanitarian Law in Islamic Jurisprudence. Michigan Journal of International Law 15:605–43.Google Scholar
de Benoist, Alain. 2007. Global Terrorism and the State of Permanent Exception: The Significance of Carl Schmitt's Thought Today. In The International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt: Terror, Liberal War, and the Crisis of Global Order, ed. Odysseos, Louiza and Petito, Fabio, 73–96. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Benton, Lauren. 2010. A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Berman, Nathaniel. 2012. “The Sacred Conspiracy”: Religion, Nationalism, and the Crisis of Internationalism. Leiden Journal of International Law 25:9–54.Google Scholar
bin Bāz, ῾Abd al‐῾Azīz. n.d. A Call for Aiding Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina. http://www.alifta.net/Fatawa/FatawaChapters.aspx?languagename=en&View=Page&PageID=1056&PageNo=1&BookID=14 (accessed June 18, 2014).Google Scholar
Bodansky, Yossef. 1996. Some Call it Peace: Waiting for War in the Balkans. London: International Media.Google Scholar
Boellstorff, Tom. 2006. Domesticating Islam: Sexuality, Gender, and the Limits of Pluralism. Law & Social Inquiry 31 (4): 1035–53.Google Scholar
Bose, Sumantra. 2002. Bosnia After Dayton: Nationalist Partition and International Intervention. London: Hurst.Google Scholar
Bougarel, Xavier. 2001. L'islam bosniaque, entre identité culturelle et idéologie politique. In Le nouvel islam balkanique: Les musulmans, acteurs du post‐communisme 1990–2000, ed. Bougarel, Xavier and Clayer, Nathalie, 79–132. Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose.Google Scholar
Bringa, Tone. 1995. Being Muslim the Bosnian Way: Identity and Community in a Central Bosnian Village. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Calafat, Guillaume. 2011 . Ottoman North Africa and Ius Publicum Europaeum: The Case of the Treaties of Peace and Trade (1600–1750). In War, Trade and Neutrality: Europe and the Mediterranean in the Seventeenth Centuries, ed. Alimento, Antonella, 171–87. Milan: Franco Angeli.Google Scholar
Cameron, Lindsey, and Chetail, Vincent. 2013. Privatizing War: Private Military and Security Companies Under Public International Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Cerić, Mustafa. 1993. Fetva broj 2. Preporod, December, 16.Google Scholar
Chandler, David. 2000. Bosnia: Faking Democracy After Dayton, 2nd ed. London: Pluto Press.Google Scholar
Coles, Kimberley. 2007. Democratic Designs: International Intervention and Electoral Practices in Postwar Bosnia‐Herzegovina. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Cook, David. 2005. Understanding Jihad. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Deliso, Christopher. 2007. The Coming Balkan Caliphate: The Threat of Radical Islam to Europe and the West. Westport, CT: Praeger Security International.Google Scholar
Donia, Robert. 1981. Islam Under the Double Eagle: The Muslims of Bosnia and Hercegovina, 1878–1914. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Donner, Fred. 1991. The Sources of Islamic Conceptions of War. In Just War and Jihad: Historical and Theoretical Perspectives on War and Peace in Western and Islamic Traditions, ed. Kelsay, John and Turner Johnson, James, 31–69. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.Google Scholar
al‐Furqān. 1993. Hādhā mā fa῾ala al‐Ṣirb fil‐Būsna. al‐Furqān, July, 36–37.Google Scholar
Gelvin, James. 2008. Al‐Qaeda and Anarchism: A Historian's Reply to Terrorology. Terrorism and Political Violence 20:563–81.Google Scholar
Gerges, Fawaz. [2005] 2009. The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Geuss, Raymond. 2001. History and Illusion in Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Ghānim, Yaḥyā. 1993. Kuntu hunāka … yawmiyyāt murāsil ḥarbī fil‐Būsna: al‐Milaff al‐sirrī li‐ibādat sha῾b. Cairo: Dār al‐naṣr lil‐ṭibā῾a al‐islāmiyya.Google Scholar
Greble, Emily. 2014. Illusions of Justice: Fascist, Customary, and Islamic Law in the Independent State of Croatia. Past and Present 222:249–74.Google Scholar
Hādī, Anwar ῾Abd Allāh. 1996. Riḥlat al‐nār wal‐thulūj. Jedda: Fahrisa maktabat al‐Malik Fahd al‐waṭaniyya athnā᾽ al‐nashr.Google Scholar
Hagan, John. 2003. Justice in the Balkans: Prosecuting War Crimes in the Hague Tribunal. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Hagan, John, Levi, Ron, and Ferrales, Gabrielle. 2006. Swaying the Hand of Justice: The Internal and External Dynamics of Regime Change at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Law & Social Inquiry 31 (3): 585–616.Google Scholar
Hallaq, Wael. 2004. Can the Shari'a Be Restored? In Islamic Law and the Challenges of Modernity, ed. Yazbeck Haddad, Yvonne and Freyer Stowasser, Barbara, 21–53. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira.Google Scholar
Hallaq, Wael. 2009. Sharī῾a: Theory, Practice, Transformations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hashmi, Sohail. 2012. Jihad and the Geneva Conventions: The Impact of International Law on Islamic Theory. In Just Wars, Holy Wars, and Jihads: Christian, Jewish, and Muslim Encounters and Exchanges, ed. Hashmi, Sohail, 325–39. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Haug, Robert. 2011. Frontiers and the State in Early Islamic History: Jihād Between Caliphs and Volunteers. History Compass 9 (8): 634–43.Google Scholar
Hayden, Robert. 1999. Blueprints for a House Divided: The Constitutional Logic of the Yugoslav Conflicts. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Haynes, Dina Francesca. 2008. Deconstructing the Reconstruction: Human Rights and the Rule of Law in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.Google Scholar
Hećimović, Esad. 2006. Garibi: Mudžahedini u BiH 1992–1999. Zenica, Bosnia: Fondacija Sina.Google Scholar
Hegghammer, Thomas. 2010. Jihad in Saudi Arabia: Violence and Pan‐Islamism Since 1979. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
al‐Hindukūshī, Abū al‐Shuqarā᾽. 2007. Mudhakkirātī min Kābul ilā Baghdād. Self‐published online.Google Scholar
el‐Hindi, Ali bin Ferid. n.d. Skraćena zbirka fikhskih propisa. Trans. Hasan Makić. Organizacija Preporoda Islamske Misli‐Kuvajt.Google Scholar
Hoare, Marko Attila. 2004. How Bosnia Armed. London: Saqi Books.Google Scholar
Hooker, William. 2009. Carl Schmitt's International Thought: Order and Orientation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hussin, Iza. 2007. The Pursuit of the Perak Regalia: Law and the Making of the Colonial State. Law & Social Inquiry 32 (3): 759–88.Google Scholar
Il Messaggerro dell’ Islam. 1995. Ricordo Di Anwar Sha'ban. Il Messaggerro dell’ Islam, November–December, 1, 7.Google Scholar
Johnson, James Turner, and Kelsay, John. 1990. Cross, Crescent, and Sword: The Justification and Limitation of War in Western and Islamic Tradition. New York: Greenwood Press.Google Scholar
Karčić, Fikret. 1997. Islamic Revival in the Balkans 1970–1992. Islamic Studies 36 (2,3): 565–81.Google Scholar
Karčić, Fikret. 1999. Administration of Islamic Affairs in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Islamic Studies 38 (4): 535–61.Google Scholar
Karčić, Fikret. [1985] 2005. Šerijatski sudovi u Jugoslaviji 1918–1941. Sarajevo: El‐Kalem.Google Scholar
Karčić, Fikret. 2008 . The Reform of Shari'a Courts and Islamic Law in Bosnia and Herzegovina 1918–1941. In Islam in Inter‐War Europe, ed. Clayer, Nathalie and Germain, Eric, 253–70. London: Hurst.Google Scholar
Keane, Rory. 2002. Reconstituting Sovereignty: Post‐Dayton Bosnia Uncovered. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.Google Scholar
Kinsella, Helen M. 2006. Gendering Grotius: Sex and Sex Difference in the Laws of War. Political Theory 34 (2): 161–91.Google Scholar
Knaus, Gerald, and Martin, Felix. 2003. Travails of the European Raj: Lessons from Bosnia and Herzegovina. Journal of Democracy 14 (3): 60–74.Google Scholar
Kohlmann, Evan. 2004. Al‐Qaida's Jihad in Europe: The Afghan‐Bosnian Network. Oxford: Berg.Google Scholar
Lacroix, Stéphane. [2010] 2011. Awakening Islam: The Politics of Religious Dissent in Contemporary Saudi Arabia. Trans. Holoch, George. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Latić, Nedžad. 1995. Hrvatska drži Šejha Ebu Talala u zatvoru i traži zemlju koja je voljna da ga primi. Ljiljan, November 15, 9–10.Google Scholar
Lia, Brynjar. 1998. Islamist Perceptions of the United Nations and its Peacekeeping Missions: Some Preliminary Findings. International Peacekeeping 5 (2): 38–63.Google Scholar
Manṣūr, Aḥmad. 1995. Taḥta wābil al‐nīrān fī Sarāyīfū. Beirut: Dār Ibn Ḥazm.Google Scholar
March, Andrew, and Modirzadeh, Naz. 2013. Ambivalent Universalism? Jus Ad Bellum in Modern Islamic Legal Discourse. European Journal of International Law 24 (1): 367–89.Google Scholar
Meijer, Roel. 2009. Global Salafism: Islam's New Religious Movement. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Mendelsohn, Barak. 2009. Combating Jihadism: American Hegemony and Interstate Cooperation in the War on Terrorism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Mesarič, Andreja. 2013. Wearing Hijab in Sarajevo: Dress Practices and the Islamic Revival in Post‐War Bosnia‐Herzegovina. Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 22 (2): 12–34.Google Scholar
Meyerstein, Ariel. 2007. Between Law and Culture: Rwanda's Gacaca and Postcolonial Legality. Law & Social Inquiry 32 (2): 467–508.Google Scholar
el‐Misri, Imad. 1993. Shvatanja koja trebamo ispraviti. Travnik, Bosnia: Islamski Centar Travnik.Google Scholar
Mlivončić, Ivica. 2007. Al Qaida se kalila u Bosni i Hercegovini: Mjesto i uloga mudžahida u Republici Hrvatskoj i Bosni i Hercegovini od 1991. do 2005. godine. Split, Croatia: Naša Ognjišta.Google Scholar
Mohamedou, Mohammad‐Mahmoud Ould. 2007. Understanding Al Qaeda: The Transformation of War. London: Pluto Press.Google Scholar
Moustafa, Tamir. 2013. Islamic Law, Women's Rights, and Popular Legal Consciousness in Malaysia. Law & Social Inquiry 38 (1): 168–88.Google Scholar
Nettelfield, Lara. 2010. Courting Democracy in Bosnia and Herzegovina: The Hague Tribunal's Impact in a Postwar State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Panaite, Viorel. 2000. The Ottoman Law of War and Peace: The Ottoman Empire and Tribute Payers. Boulder, CO: East European Monographs.Google Scholar
Percy, Sarah. 2007. Mercenaries: The History of a Norm in International Relations. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Rabb, Intisar. 2008. “We the Jurists”: Islamic Constitutionalism in Iraq. University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law 10 (3): 527–79.Google Scholar
al‐Rasheed, Madawi. 2013. A Most Masculine State: Gender, Politics and Religion in Saudi Arabia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Rowen, Jamie. 2012. Mobilizing Truth: Agenda Setting in a Transnational Social Movement. Law & Social Inquiry 37 (3): 686–718.Google Scholar
Samour, Nahed. 2012. Modernized Islamic International Law Concepts as a Third World Approach to International Law. Heidelberg Journal of International Law 72:543–77.Google Scholar
Schindler, John. 2007. Unholy Terror: Bosnia, al‐Qa'ida, and the Rise of Global Jihad. St. Paul, MN: Zenith.Google Scholar
Schmitt, Carl. [1963] 2007. Theory of the Partisan: Intermediate Commentary on the Concept of the Political. Trans. Ulmen, Gary. New York: Telos Press.Google Scholar
Shah, Niaz. 2008. Self‐Defense in Islamic and International Law: Assessing al‐Qaeda and the Invasion of Iraq. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Smiley, Will. 2012. “When Peace Is Made, You Will Again Be Free”: Islamic and Treaty Law, Black Sea Conflict, and the Emergence of “Prisoners of War” in the Ottoman Empire, 1739–1930. PhD diss., Queens’ College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.Google Scholar
Ssenyonjo, Manisuli. 2012. Jihad Re‐Examined: Islamic Law and International Law. Santa Clara Journal of International Law 10 (1): 1–33.Google Scholar
Stover, Eric. 2005. The Witnesses: War Crimes and the Promise of Justice in the Hague. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Strick van Linschoten, Alex, and Felix, Kuehn. 2011. An Enemy We Created: The Myth of the Taliban‐Al Qaeda Merger in Afghanistan. London: Hurst.Google Scholar
Subramanian, Narendra. 2008. Legal Change and Gender Inequality: Changes in Muslim Family Law in India. Law & Social Inquiry 33 (3): 631–72.Google Scholar
Syed, Mairaj. 2013. Jihad in Classical Islamic Legal and Moral Thought. In Just War in Religion and Politics, ed. Neusner, Jacob, Chilton, Bruce, and Tully, R. E., 135–62. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.Google Scholar
Tawil, Camille. [2007] 2010. Brothers in Arms: The Story of al‐Qa'ida and the Arab Jihadists. Trans. Bray, Robin. London: Saqi Books.Google Scholar
Thomson, Janice. 1994. Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns: State‐Building and Extraterritorial Violence in Early Modern Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Toal, Gerard, and Dahlman, Carl. 2011. Bosnia Remade: Ethnic Cleansing and Its Reversal. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Toholj, Miroslav. 2001. “Holy Warriors” and the War in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Belgrade: Igam.Google Scholar
Tor, Deborah. 2005. Privatized Jihad and Public Order in the Pre‐Seljuq Period: The Role of the Mutatawwi'a . Iranian Studies 38 (4): 555–73.Google Scholar
Ulmen, Gary. 2007. Partisan Warfare, Terrorism, and a New Nomos . In The International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt: Terror, Liberal War, and the Crisis of Global Order, ed. Odysseos, Louiza and Petito, Fabio, 96–106. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Warrick, Catherine. 2005. The Vanishing Victim: Criminal Law and Gender in Jordan. Law & Society Review 39 (2): 315–48.Google Scholar
Weber, Max. [1918 ] 1946. Politics as a Vocation. In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. Gerth, Hans and Wright Mills, C., 77–128. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Yurdusev, A. Nuri. 2004. The Ottoman Attitude Toward Diplomacy. In Ottoman Diplomacy: Conventional or Unconventional? ed. Nuri Yurdusev, A., 5–35. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Zečević, Selma. 2007 . Missing Husbands, Waiting Wives, Bosnian Muftis: Fatwa Texts and the Interpretation of Gendered Presences and Absences in Late Ottoman Bosnia. In Women in the Ottoman Balkans, ed. Buturović, Amila and Cemil Schick, İrvin, 335–60. London: I. B. Tauris.Google Scholar

Cases Cited

Prosecutor v. Duško Tadić, ICTY‐94‐1‐T (1996).Google Scholar
Prosecutor v. Enver Hadžihasanović and Amir Kubura, ICTY‐01‐47‐T (2006).Google Scholar
Prosecutor v. Rasim Delić, ICTY‐04‐83‐T (2008).Google Scholar

Statutes Cited

Amendment to Article 9 of the Legal Order on Citizenship of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (18/92), published in BH Službeni Glasnik, 11/93, May 10, 1993.Google Scholar